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Hawke's Bay Times, Issue 1631, 24 November 1874, Page 437

A Needed Precaution.—Dr. Erskine was remarkable for his simplicity of manner and gentle temper. He returned so often from the pulpit minus his pocket-handker-chief, and he could tell so little how or where it was lost, that Mrs Erskine at last began to suspect that the handkerchiefs were stolen as he ascended the pulpit stairs bysome of the old wives who lined it. So, both to baulk and detect the culprit, she sewed a corner of a handkerchief to one of the pockets of his coat tails. Half way up the stairs the good doctor felt a tug, whereupon he turned round to the old woman, whose was the guilty hand, to say, with great calmness and simplicity, " No the day, honest woman ; no the day, Mrs Erskine has sewed it in."— Br Guthrie's Autobiography.

Too Much for Him.—Dr Guthrie was examing a witness in a church trial, who did not wish to tell all he knew. The case was that of a minister charged with drunkenness. Besides other proofs, having drawn this out of a witness that the minister, on one occasion, as he lolled over the side of the pulpitbeing, in fact, unable to stand upright—said that he loved his people so much that he would carry them all to heaven on his back, I asked him, •'' Now, John, when you heard him say so what impressiou did so strange a speech make on you 1 " " Weel," he replied, " Maister Guthrie, I'll just tell you what I thought. There was a good fat wife, you see, sitting in the scat before me, and thinks I, My lad if you set off to the kingdom of heaven with that wife on your back, my certie you'll no be back for the rest o' us in a hurry !"— Br Outhrich Autobiography. The Stones of the Great Pyramid.— According to Professor Piazzi Smyth, the finest specimen of one of the "casing stones" of the Great Pyramid known at present to exist, either in Europe or even in Egypt, was received in Edinburgh a few weeks ago from Mr Waynman Dixon, a young engineer who has recently completed an iron bridge across the Nile between Cairo and Ghizeh. The specimen possesses, Professor Smyth says, in a more or less injured condition, five of the anciently-worked sides of the block, including the upper and lower horizontal surfaces, together with the bevelled slope which led the late Mr John Taylor to what Professor Smyth calls "the immortal archaeological truth that the shape of the entire monument was carefully so adjusted and exactly fasliioned in its own day to precisely such a figure that it does, vulgarly, demonstrate in the right way the true and practical squaring of the circle." Whether this be the case or no, Professor Smyth declares that the length of the front foot of the stone, or that line or edge from which the angular slope, of the whole stone commences to rise, measures " within the limit of mensuration error now unavoidable the number of just twenty-five pyramid inches, neither less nor more. And twenty-five pyramid inches have been shown to be the ten-millionth part of the length of the earth's semi-axis of rotation." Professor Smyth is very severe on the Egyptologists of the British Museum for the manner in which they conduct their department.

How the " Psalm of Life " was Written.—The '• Psalm of Life" came into existence on a bright Summer morning: in July, 1838, in Cambridge, as the poet sat between two windows at the small table in the corner of his chamber. It was a voice from his inmost heart, and he kept it some time iu manuscript unwilling to part with it. It expressed his own feelings at that time, when be was rallying from the depression of a deep affliction, and he hid a poem in his own heart for many months. He was accused of taking the famous verse, " Art is long and time is fleeting," from Bishop's poem, but I happen to know that was not in his mind, and that the thought came to him with as much freshness and originality as if nothing had been written before. " There is a reaper whose name is Death " crystallized at once, without effort, in the poet's mind, and he wrote it rapidly down, with tears filling his eyes as he composed it. " The light of the Stars " was composed as the poet looked out upon a beautiful Summer evening, exactly suggestive of the poem. The moon, a little strip of silver, was just setting behind Mount Auburn, and Mars was blazing in the South. That fine ballad, " The wreck of the Hesperus," was written in 1830, A violent storm had occured the night before. As the poet sat smoking his -pipe about midnight by the fire, the wrecked Hesperus came sailing into his mind. He went to his bed, but the poem had seized hold of him, and he could not sleep. He got up and wrote the celebrated verses. " The clock was striking three," he said, " when I finished the last stanza." It did not come into his mind by lines, but by whole verses, flowing, without let or hindrance,— Jm\m T, Fieldd,

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